Vacant Lot

ARTICLES ABOUT VACANT LOT BY DATE - PAGE 5

The Bangor Area School District will auction off a vacant lot it owns that once held an elementary school on 4th Street in Bangor. Bangor Elementary School was closed in 1993 when the district built DeFranco Elementary School at the Five Points campus in Upper Mount Bethel Township. The borough school was torn down about a year later when it became too expensive to maintain. The district spent $200,000 to raze the building. An auction date has not been set, said Superintendent Wilford Ottey, but the district will not accept less than a certain amount for the 2.12 acres.

by THOMAS L. APPLEBACH (A free-lance story for The Morning Call) | June 13, 1996

Despite efforts to delay a vote to take bids for the sale of borough-owned property, Red Hill Council voted 6-1 last night to go ahead with the controversial plan. Bids will now be taken on the 12,500-square-foot lot at Washington and 3rd streets. Purchased by the borough in 1993 for $26,000, the lot was slated to become part of a road between 3rd and 4th streets. Although the street has existed for years on paper, the purchase was the first actual acquisition of land. Now it seems that the circumstances have changed and the road is no longer needed.

A Girl Scout Troop teamed up in spring with a local resident to beautify a scrap of land at Roth Avenue and 12th Street where a billboard stands. Robert Williams, whose gardening interests in the past have led him to plant flowers at his church and on a vacant lot, wanted to grow flowers at the site, but didn't know who owned it. Betsy Levin, manager of Allentown's Bureau of Recycling and Solid Waste and a member of the Clean and Green Committee, located...

Bethlehem parking officials are warning drivers who park in a vacant South Side lot that beginning Thursday their vehicles will be ticketed and towed. Until this week, parking in the lot -- on E. Third Street between Webster and Adams streets -- has been free. Developers are building a strip mall on the lot to be anchored by a Rite Aid drugstore and cars need to be cleared to make way for construction. The vacant lot is popular with Lehigh University students and some patrons of stores in the area, said Bethlehem Parking Authority Executive Director Michael Spitzer.

State police at Swiftwater are seeking information about the murder of a Blairstown, N.J., man last year. The body of Robert J. Hagan, 45, was found along Rim Rock Road in Hamilton Township, several hundred yards south of Route 611. The victim's vehicle was discovered the following day, several miles away in a wooded area off Shaffers Schoolhouse Road. Hagan is known to have been in the area late on Aug. 7, 1993, and into the early morning. During this time, Hagan traveled near the Bartonsville Truck Stop, the Playtime Boutique, the Comfort Inn and the vacant lot on Rim Rock Road near Interstate 80, according to police.

The Bethlehem Zoning Hearing Board last night unanimously denied a local developer's request to build four townhouses on the South Side on lots smaller than allowed. After several neighbors near the proposed development at 962-968 Moravia St. objected to the plan, the board said the developer, Alan Finnegan didn't qualify for a variance. The corner lot is at Moravia and Benner streets. Finnegan sought variances related to setback requirements and lot size for his plan, but the board ruled that he failed to show a hardship by developing the parcel within zoning guidelines.

A building owned by the late Larry Marra that has been vacant for more than a decade began collapsing and was later demolished yesterday on Northampton Street in Easton. Police and firefighters barricaded the sidewalk around 647 Northampton St. about 1 p.m. after the roof and the top portion of a brick sidewall collapsed inward. They said the building has been deteriorating for more than 15 years and a combination of structural weakness and "fate" likely caused the collapse. No floors were left in the three-story shell before the cave-in.